Welcome to Human Loops: how to decode the patterns that run your life and world

What if I told you that your morning doom scrolling, relationship problems and the world's political crises are all following the same hidden patterns? Once you see them, you can't unsee them.

Scroll. Another crisis. Scroll. Another outrage. Scroll. Another political promise that won't be kept. Your thumb moves automatically while your brain whispers that you've seen this before.

We all have.

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ANOTHER celebrity melt-down on social media, another corrupt government, another big accident, another war with even more victims in some other part of the world, even another genocide.

And there doesn't seem to be much we can do about it, does there?. Just keep scrolling, The news is always inherently negative and smartphone app algorithms are wired for viral emotional outrage.

Somehow, though, you also get the feeling that now is different compared to ten years ago but if someone asks you to explain, you're not quite sure how we got here from there.

Similarly with our personal lives, or jobs and businesses. We get stuck in a rut, or the same script seems to be playing out with a different person. Some version of Groundhog Day,.or our personal autopilot modes.

But here's the thing: it is not, I found out, so random. Humans, all of us—whether in courtrooms, politics, hospitals, accidents or marriages—follow remarkably predictable patterns, emotional loops shaped by past experiences, layered identities and the pressure of having to do something next.

This newsletter will decode those loops for you.

How did I get here?

Over the 10 years I wrote The Spain Report, I dug into and witnessed a very broad range of human stories. Broad in the geographical sense (the focus was national), broad in scope (politics, accidents, trials, hospitals and the pandemic), and broad socially (from the abdication of the King to cleaners mopping up vomit and blood in Covid wards).

I also found myself drawn to very deep and very close details. That's how you understand what actually happened to be able to explain it better, right? You need the details. Which is the same as translation. So translation of words and concepts but also translation of events, from one level of life to another, from participants to readers, from Spain to the world. And the details matter, they mean something.

So I reported on all four months of the Catalan separatist trial at the Supreme Court. Every day. I listened to the firemen and doctors and psychologists and forensic examiners (and the priest) in Angrois when the Alvia train crashed in 2013, killing 81 people in an instant. I saw the political and social shifts that brought about the sudden rise of Podemos in Spain after years of mass unemployment, from the public squares to the seats of political power. I chronicled the horrible details of a murder trial in Almería in 2019 from the front row of the courtroom (for some reason, there were only four of us who chose to do that, out of 140 journalists nominally reporting on the trial).. And during the pandemic, I felt like the right thing to do was to get inside the Covid wards before the vaccines, so I did that too.

The ministers were not going within 100 miles of the messier, riskier side of pandemic life if they could help it. They were happy with charts and statistics and their daily press releases. To be fair, most of the journalists were too. The nurses' reality, though, was sick or dying patients, very lonely patients inside those cordoned off zones, and the fear they would infect their own children when they got home from work.

Patterns everywhere

As I went along, I started to notice patterns. Patterns of events, patterns of situations and patterns of human behaviour. I kept the notes and updated them every few months and then got on with whatever the next story was.

Everyone has some version of limited resources, for example, at least from their perspective in life, with whatever goals they have in mind for their next efforts. Nobody knows what will actually happen tomorrow, even the participants, hence the constant narrative tension in news events, as all of the players interpret dynamic events and the other undecided, observer-participant players in real-time too.

And almost everyone is stuck in their little trench somewhere in life and cannot see far beyond it because most of their time is focused on that place. Doctors in the Covid wards didn't really know what was happening in the other hospitals in the same city, never mind the regional or national trends. Lawyers are focused on the prosecution or defence of their case, and rightly so. Politicians are stuck in their ideological tribes, and more now than ever, it seems.

So it surprised me to learn that reporting is also often translating or transmitting meaning and events between the actual participants in some story, as it continues to unfold. It's just like the parable of the blindfolded men and the elephant: everyone perceives some piece of the animal from where they are but it's extraordinarily difficult to stand back and see the whole.

Detached political presentations of ideologically framed pandemic statistics are a far cry from the fear and suffering in an actual Covid ward. Deeply considered written Supreme Court rulings on intellectual notions of Justice from the nation's capital, while necessary for the social whole, are most definitely not the same as the raw emotions in a provincial courtroom when the matter at hand is the vicious murder of a small boy.

Trials and politics, of course, are all about trying to win arguments from one of those different perspectives and convincing you that the other narratives are wrong, not about rationally describing the whole.

Patterns to notes to a framework

The pile of notes on human behaviour and responses, and systems and situations, grew over the years. Piles of patterns from all those different realms of life.

And then there's the question of how somebody, in some situation, comes to respond in the way they do to what happens next. How they adapt or don't to a constantly changing reality.

How do pilots sometimes manage to crash perfectly good airliners into mountains or the ocean? Why does another cop shoot another unarmed suspect in a dark alley somewhere? How does a previously shunned political ideology suddenly seem to have become mainstream? How do life-long friends or even family members end up splitting over Brexit or Trump? At the extreme, how does a society descend all the way into genocidal hatred and destruction?

How do we get from individual lives and reactions to whole societies changing over time? And why is it so hard to change or to get others to understand what we can so evidently see?

It's all about emotional humans with some version of limited resources responding to the pressures of life based on whatever identities and baggage they have accumulated in previous years.

So that means the notes I have made over the past 15 years are really about all of our lives and situations, at different levels and in a billion different actual contexts.

And now they have coalesced into a coherent framework.

We are all human, we all have complex layers of lives and pasts, and we are all reacting to the constant unfolding of new moments of life every day, within some structural situations and sets of relationships.

Human Loops will be all about that. I'm not a neuroscientist, not a philosopher, not a psychologist, not a priest, but the notes I made over the years,and what they describe touch on all of those areas to some interesting degree. We can also get stuck into history and literature.

It's not self-help, but it will help you to understand things much better. And the framework appears to be fractal and scale invariant, which means you can apply it to situations at all of the levels we have just mentioned.

It's going to take a while to explain and to give it a bit more form—it goes pretty deep once you start applying it to real situations— but we certainly have enough for a new newsletter now. It is applicable to your personal life and relationships, your job and business situations and to better understanding politics and news events. It will help you uncover all of the complex layers.

So welcome to Human Loops. Subscribe to find out how they work and how you can apply them.

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Human Loops For You:

• Start Seeing Your Patterns: 15 core questions and four examples to help you start thinking about your own complex life situations (free pdf when you subscribe)

• AI Prompt Pack: Analyse your life situations with your favourite LLM (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.) and these copy-and-paste Human Loop situational prompts.

• 1-on-1 Calls & Coaching: work with Matthew directly to analyse your own complex personal or professional loops and situations. Limited availability.

• Business Consulting & Reports: work with Matthew to apply the framework to your brands, core values, team dynamics, market landscapes and scenarios.